In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Queer Media Loci
  • Alexandra Juhasz and Ming-Yuen S. Ma

We are thrilled to inaugurate Queer Media Loci in this issue of GLQ. A new, ongoing series for the Moving Image Review, Queer Media Loci is designed to present a cross-sectional analysis of queer media at a specific location. As issues of globalization, border crossing, migration, and diaspora are increasingly being addressed in queer scholarship, we want to situate discussions around queer media production, exhibition, and reception within these debates and to shift the focus away from what remains a predominantly European-American context. In the Queer Media Loci series, we ask the following questions of each of our authors: What makes the chosen geographic location distinct? What kinds of queer media activities happen there? How do these media activities define or describe this locus? And how are they produced by, and how do they in turn produce, media representations of the locus?

In the series, we define a locus as a specific place—a city, town, village, neighborhood, region, or, in some cases, a country—that perceives itself as distinct and projects a distinct culture or identity to the world at large. Instead of presenting generalized surveys and lists of organizations, festivals, and other venues for exhibition and production, our cross-sectional approach encourages our authors to examine a broader, representative range of images and interpretations created through close reading, thick description, and an insider's perspective. We ask our authors to consider queer media activities that range from commercial and industrial productions to underground, local, and grassroots activities, as well as events and cultural phenomena that do not necessarily manifest as conventional festivals or screenings, including online spaces and new media productions. The methodologies used by authors will vary by loci. Each locus, with its own social, cultural, political, and historical context, will require an approach that is appropriate to its circumstances. Thus, we anticipate commissioning studies from scholars, curator/programmers, activists, and other practitioners who are trained in different disciplines and have different expertise. Queer Media Loci presents a series [End Page 167] of specific, in-depthcase studies that can help sketch out a larger picture of the queer media being produced, consumed, debated, and censored in locations that are increasingly visited and inhabited by queers, but not necessarily looked at or studied as centers of queer media production. In this sense, our use of the term locus is crucial in that its deployment signals the undoing of the relation between cities (the established, First-World queer capitals of San Francisco, New York, London, Paris, Berlin, and Amsterdam) and nation or region, and opens up into the less restrictive and non-Eurocentric category of place or location.

In conceiving the series, we are also aware of its potential dangers. We are wary of producing a queer touristic discourse—a sex tour of queer media in exotic locales, or an Atlantic or Olivia cruise with movies, as it were. We therefore encourage our authors to challenge and interrogate colonial and capitalist tendencies within their and our communities. In fact, queer sex tourism and the larger issue of queer touristic discourse are confronted directly in our inaugural project on Bangkok by Dredge Käng. As mentioned above, we also encourage our authors to examine other forms of intercultural communication, including migration, border crossing, and diaspora, and to look at how these transnational and global flows of information and bodies are expressed in and through queer media. We are interested in pursuing how these issues help define or disrupt a sense of place, focusing in particular on queer media that can construct or challenge nationalistic ideologies or other forms of localized group identity.

We are extremely pleased that Käng has taken up our challenge and produced an inaugural contribution to Queer Media Loci that exemplifies our goals for the series as a whole. His multifaceted analysis of the queer mediascape in Bangkok—a locus that is very much queer-identified but also visited and at the same time "othered" in relationship to the aforementioned First-World queer centers—examines diverse media forms, from Internet blogs to television and film to street protests. Käng's essay performs important...

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